A number of us here at Paper Giant used to be educators – lecturers or tutors at universities, mostly – and so it’s no surprise that teaching design (or capability building, as it is regularly labelled) has become a core part of our work.

This year, we’ve delivered both public and private training around co-design, design research and service design. We’ve helped multiple government departments establish design education programs, and created resources, guides, toolkits and other support materials that clients use to deliver better projects. On top of that, almost all of our recent project work has had structured elements of mentorship and coaching within it, through which we work alongside client teams to deliver human-centred outcomes.

Most of this education work is about helping people use design. We’re often introducing design to people for the first time, so that they can work with problems in new ways. We also try to help design teams do better, by delivering training around specialties like qualitative research, research ethics, or storytelling and organisational engagement.

What we’ve learned from this work is that design is being widely embraced, and it’s being asked to solve increasingly complex problems. We’ve also learned that practitioners don’t necessarily feel like they have the skills and structures to do what they see as necessary. Imposter syndrome is common, and it appears that, once you’ve learned enough to get your first job, education is largely experience based and self-guided.

A two-day course can only teach so much, and three-year degrees are impractical for many professionals. Which leaves the third option: reflection on experience. We try to bring that to each of our projects, but we understand how difficult it can be to protect the time and space to do it properly.

Like all habits, learning takes work to sustain. From our perspective, what is the biggest lesson? What makes the biggest difference? The commitment to keep trying.

One of the benefits of working in design consulting is that you are constantly exposed to new ways of working, thinking and considering. For example, about six months ago I was exposed to the concept of ‘models of care’ in healthcare systems.

A model of care is a set of steps, practice guidelines, and instructions on how to provide the best possible care for a patient. This is about more than how to practise medicine, it’s about taking into account individual circumstances, medical best practice, legislation, services offered across the system, and using all this to take a holistic approach to ‘care’ for someone. A good model of care (for example, the Cancer Council’s care pathways) asks ‘how can we deliver the best possible outcomes for each patient?’

This is even more complex for people at the end of their lives, where the ‘best possible care’ can mean many different things. Maintaining dignity, making sure patient choices are respected, and ensuring equality of access are all challenges here. The new ‘assisted dying’ laws in Victoria are an example of legislation that has been put into effect to address some of the care needs of people with terminal illness that were not previously being met by our health care system in Victoria.

Something that is unfortunate about how much of society delivers services, is that even with efforts towards fair access and equity, many of our systems still favour the advantaged. Just staying with health care in Australia – the design of the NDIS, despite its rhetoric around choice, has unfairly advantaged the already privileged.

Maybe approaching the work of design, and thinking about the models we create as ‘models of care’ can help us here?

How do we care for people, society, and the planet, and what models are we following? How can the models and systems we design deliver the best possible outcomes, so that all people can be treated with dignity, equality and respect?

“There are many opportunities to create systems that work from the elements and technologies that exist. Perhaps we should do nothing else for the next century but apply our knowledge. We already know how to build, maintain, and inhabit sustainable systems. Every essential problem is solved, but in the everyday life of people this is hardly apparent.”

⁠— Bill Mollison, Permaculture: a Designer’s Manual (1988)

Innovation, in my experience, rarely means coming up with something new. In my career as a designer, some of the most ‘innovative’ things I’ve seen or participated in have been exactly what Bill Mollison describes – applying existing knowledge in a new way, to build systems that work.

As we face new challenges in a rapidly changing political, social, economic and ecological climate, we would do well to pay attention to what we already know how to do.In the last newsletter I talked about how we already know how to solve the homelessness crisis. (Hint: give people homes.) There are many, many facets of society where ‘applying existing knowledge’ could be a true innovation. We already know how to transition away from coal, for example.

Now, I’m not saying that applying existing knowledge is easy – all sorts of things hold us back from being able to lift and apply innovation from elsewhere. The specifics of local communities, local attitudes, local ideologies, local relationships – they all matter if change is going to stick!

This is why things like co-design – community led, adaptive, iterative and local –are the only way we’ll make lasting innovative change in places where change needs to happen. For this reason, I’m heartened by the renewed attention being paid to co-design, systems thinking, permaculture, and similar fields in the design industry as a whole.

And though originally designed 40 years ago, the basic texts and principles of permaculture still hold true today. At this moment, we should be paying more attention to what we already know, and looking for innovative ways to apply this knowledge.

By denying unemployed people the money needed for basic survival, Australia is actively forcing people into homelessness. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: people without a permanent residence find it hard to apply for work, have trouble accessing services, and are increasingly likely to end up in prison. People with a criminal record face even more challenges finding work. Women are increasingly overrepresented in this cycle.

Paper Giant has been doing work in sectors such as criminal justice, social services, and disability services in Victoria for a few years now, and every time we attempt to look at where we might have some impact, we come up against these self-reinforcing cycles of poverty.

The most frustrating part of this is, if you talk to anyone who works in social services, they already know the solution! Raise Newstart. Fund housing. Offer support without judgement.

But to make a change to a system like this obviously requires more than just knowing a solution. It requires a change in mindset across the system: an orientation towards care, support and recovery; not blame and punishment.

There are great examples of this out there. Two that spring to mind are Dandenong’s drug court (where the focus is on treatment and recovery, not punishment), and a newly revamped Ozanam House (where an understanding of trauma as both a cause and effect of homelessness underpins their work). Our recent StreamlineFines project is a smaller example of work that aims for a holistic approach to intertwined social and health outcomes.

I feel like every newsletter that I write ends up being about transformative systems change in some way, but I realise that’s for good reason – the systems that make up our society are not working equally, fairly or sustainably for everyone. But they were made by people, so they can be changed by people.

There’s this strange thing that happens in Australia every June – it’s called the ‘End of Financial Year’ (aka EOFY). It’s an odd time where companies and government agencies alike are trying to spend as much money as possible to justify their budget requests for the next financial year and reduce their tax liability.

What it means for consultancies like ours is that June is the busiest time of year: the time when our clients desperately need work delivered before July rolls around, and we are working as hard as we can to deliver it.

It’s also winter, and everyone wants to take a break.

It’s also school holiday time.

It’s also flu season.

And what happens is the interaction between these things – busiest time of year + winter + holiday time + flu season – means we arrive early July exhausted and gasping for breath. I don’t know about you, but if I wanted to design a healthy working economy, this is not how I would go about it. And there are ways to design better economies – check out this article on 5 things Australia could do right now to end poverty.

All this is really just a preamble to explain why you might notice the newsletter is a little light on this week. We hope you are able to be kind to yourself for the rest of the winter months!

About two years ago, we had the opportunity to do an amazing research project into something that affects nearly everyone at some point in their lives.

The project was called ‘The Death of a Loved One’. It aimed to map the experience of dealing with death in Australia, and for a good reason: to make clear the failings of public and private services, and to find opportunities to make a difficult experience a bit less difficult all-round for those of us left behind.

Qualitative research on ‘life events’ (e.g. ‘having a baby’, ‘moving out of home’, ‘dying’) is foundational for service providers because these events are foundational to our lives. They affect every aspect from the financial to the emotional, and are the times we are most likely to need external support. Research in these areas will always have application far outside the instigating project’s scope. Even though our work is two years old, the findings are still relevant, and will likely remain relevant for many years to come.

For me personally, doing this work really highlighted the importance of gaining qualitative insight into experiences, to understand people’s situations before implementing change – especially situations that are as complex, diverse and nuanced as someone close to you dying.

Two of our primary goals at Paper Giant are to build communities and start conversations.

This week marks a year since we moved into our current studio space in Melbourne’s CBD – a beautiful, spacious and light-filled room, which we’ve filled with modular furniture and whiteboards, and which we’ve tried to make feel and behave like a public library. Almost everything is on wheels, and we’re pleased with the way the space can shift and respond to the demands of project work as well as for public events.

At the time of our move, the space was much bigger than we needed. We committed to the lease because we knew it would become a key part of the infrastructure to achieve our longer-term goals. Over the last twelve months we’ve hosted a huge number and variety of events, both for and outside of the design community in Melbourne. This effort culminated in a massive May, during which we hosted four events.

Our ‘Diversity in the Innovation Ecosystem’ event for Melbourne Knowledge Week is the one we’re most proud of. We wanted to bring people together to talk about different forms of diversity and inclusion, and promote frank discussions about how it does or doesn’t work in practice, and I think we were successful. (Read a write-up of the event.)

In service of our goals though, it’s important that we don’t expect everyone to come to us. To that end, I’ll be heading to London at the end of June to run a workshop on Designing (and Surviving) for the End of Life at GOOD19, after which i'll be connecting with old and new design research colleagues at User Research London.

Right before then, we’ll be running our Design Research for Product and Service Innovation training in Melbourne. We’re thrilled to announce that this is sold out, but if you’re interested in getting better at collecting and working with qualitative data, details on the waitlist are below.

In the meantime, we hope that the spaces you make, are part of, and visit are rewarding, supportive and fun. We know that ours is. Make sure you drop by sometime.

Last week we hosted five incredible speakers and a room full of inquisitive minds at our workshop 'Diversity in the innovation ecosystem’ in partnership with Committee for Melbourne, as part of Melbourne Knowledge Week.

As I write this, it seems we face another three years of cruelty towards people living in poverty, another three years of dismantling our social security system, another three years of pandering to white nationalists and racists, another three years of regression and inaction on climate, and another three years of cynical economic models that ignore the societal costs of inaction on all these issues.

But however we might feel about this particular election outcome, the challenges we face today are the same that we faced yesterday.

One week to go and we are very excited to announce that Dr Ruth De Souza will be joining us at our workshop Diversity in the Innovation Ecosystem. We’ve been working with Ruth to support a leading community health organisation in co-designing their strategic vision for cultural safety.

Ruth has a passionate interest in disentangling racism from health and social care. She advocates for replacing the idea of ‘diversity’ with ‘cultural safety’, an ethical framework developed by Indigenous Māori nurses from Aotearoa New Zealand.

For an intro to Ruth’s work and thinking, we recommend this piece written for the Australian College of Nursing. She outlines how ‘diversity’ has become a feel-good term of celebration, rather than a tool for truly holding our organisations to account.

She discusses how our current use of ‘diversity’ still places whiteness at the centre - with everyone else being framed in terms of their difference from whiteness. It’s not enough to have nurses from a variety of backgrounds – “representation in the workforce doesn’t mean that the people who are culturally different have a voice in the corridors of power.”

Read the full piece for a breakdown of the other ways in which ‘diversity’ fails us.

Ruth is an independent consultant, and also works as Academic Convenor of the Data, Systems and Society Research Network (DSSRN) and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Informatics and Population Health Informatics (HaBIC) at the University of Melbourne. Ruth has an extensive background as a nurse, educator and researcher, as well as holding a number of community and governance roles.

Ruth blogs at ruthdesouza.com and tweets as @desouzarn. This event is part of Melbourne Knowledge Week, 20–26 May 2019, proudly presented by the City of Melbourne. Paper Giant is hosting this event in partnership with Committee for Melbourne.

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Paper Giant acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation as the traditional owners of the lands on which our office is located, and the traditional owners of country on which we meet and work throughout Australia. We recognise that sovereignty over the land has never been ceded, and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.